Meanwhile, somewhere in the Pacific...

My goodness, how has it been three weeks since I wrote here? When you're on a ten-day week, and busy for much of it, time slips right by. Well, I can't possibly recap everything that's happened, but here are some highlights:

We went out to Managaha Island one evening with Marilyn and Randy, the archaeologists/bird rehabbers, to go check on the Wedge-tailed Shearwater colony that nests there every summer. Shearwaters are basically nocturnal duck-sized albatrosses (how cool is that?) which nest in coastal burrows. Marilyn and Randy keep track of every nest on the island, and band every bird they can that comes through simply by going through at night and picking the birds up off the ground while they congregate or pulling them out of their burrows for a few minutes. So we got to go and round up some shearwaters and band them, and I wish I could have taken photos, but crawling around in old Japanese bunkers on my belly to grab seabirds really isn't a very good situation to put my camera in. There are probably around fifty burrows on Managaha right now, though that's a rough estimate based on how much running around we did, and come August the eggs will likely have hatched, at which point we'll go back out to band the nestlings, which will be even more fun.

I know I talk a lot about the cool wildlife here on Saipan, and sometimes go into some of the plants as well, and even the history of the island (and expect a little more of that in a few paragraphs). But bear with me for a second while I talk about geology, a subject that is pretty dry for most people. The geology of Saipan is pretty remarkable, as it turns out. Saipan, like the rest of the Marianas, has a volcano at its core, but Mt. Tapochao is long-dormant. The subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Philippine Sea Plate created the Mariana Trench, and along the western side of the rift, volcanoes such as Mt. Tapochao rose up from the sea floor, beginning around 50 million years ago and continuing until around 38 million years ago (meanwhile, the more northern islands are much younger, and some, such as the seamount just south of Sarigan, are still growing and erupting, as we all heard last week). Those volcanoes soon became hosts to a wide variety of corals, which built a reef, and then the island, reef and volcano and all, was uplifted several times over the millennia due to the same tectonic interactions that created it in the first place, eventually leaving an island made of eroded coral terraces around a volcanic core. This means there are a lot of very sharp limestone rocks here! But the landscape is pretty dramatic, and it's unusual to go up to places like the top of Suicide Cliff and know that you're standing on a section of ancient uplifted fossilized coral reef. The current reef shelf is only about a foot underwater most of the time, if that, and so I suspect someday the ridge that the islands are on will uplift again, and Saipan will nearly double in size.

A little bit of a banding update - we're catching fewer and fewer birds as the drought continues, with a maximum of 11 this week at a site that should be catching closer to 30 or 40. We've caught some rarities, though - a Mariana Fruit Dove, another one of Saipan's fine critically endangered species, rarely captured as they typically hang out in the canopy; and a Yellow Bittern, a bird that is not in and of itself rare, being found throughout the Pacific and East Asia, but typically only one is caught per year here as they usually hang out in the reeds at Lake Susupe or fly over the banding sites, but don't usually go in the forested areas our nets are in. For those of you curious about how we weigh our birds, this honeyeater will demonstrate. We weigh every bird we catch to get an idea of their condition, and to do so we place the bird in a tube, place the tube on the scale, and then subtract the weight of the tube after the bird is released.

And now it's history time. A little-publicized fact about Saipan is that from 1949 to 1962, the entire northern half of the island was blocked off for use by the CIA. The story at the time was that it was for use as a Navy training base, but in truth, the CIA turned what is now Capitol Hill into a base for monitoring communications in East Asia - Vietnam and China in particular - as well as training their espionage agents. In 1951, the CIA brought several rural Tibetans to Saipan to train them in tactics that would help fight China, and in the early 1960s, a radar station was set up on Laderan Tangke which still stands today, providing for some creepy Cold War explorations in the many abandoned buildings at the site. CIA offices and other buildings still litter the Capitol Hill region as well, and while many are occupied for use as government buildings, others remain as empty as they were in 1962 when the CIA left the islands.

All right, I have a feeling nobody will ever read all of this, but if you made it to the bottom without skimming, well done! If you've been following the island's power problems, we made it through last weekend without any outages because they were able to come up with enough money to stall the situation off, but the CNMI government now owes the utility company $1.2 million by Friday because they haven't paid the bill in four months and the utility company has run out of money to buy fuel from Mobil, and so the governor has declared a state of emergency which will supposedly allow him to reallocate funds from other areas of the budget. Apparently, the last time this happened was just last fall, so this isn't anything new for Saipan. So once again, I know last weekend was a false alarm, but I may be out of contact this coming weekend instead. Or perhaps I won't. We just don't know.

Due to the long break between updates, I have a lot of photos that haven't been linked here but which can be found at my Flickr set as usual, so go ahead and look through them when you have a moment.